


Buzzard's Talons

by Masu_Trout



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Body Horror, Forehead Touching, Loss of Control, M/M, Neck Grabbing, Resentment, Touch-Starved, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-10-24 06:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17699681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Formless, twisted, wreathed in shadows and smoke, dripping other men's blood with every step he took, Gabriel was notGabrieltonight.Reaper gets a little too eager on a mission. Akande helps, for a certain definition ofhelping.





	Buzzard's Talons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DreadlordTally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreadlordTally/gifts).



"Did I ask you to take this mission on alone?"

Akande stood with his back to the dented metal door of their current hideout, pretending to be focused on the computer screen in front of him. His field of vision was compromised, and that was a risk, but facing the doors—and the man he knew he'd find standing there—would be even more of one.

Right now, making eye contact could be seen as a threat. And Akande was Doomfist, The Successor, _of course_ he was a threat, but it wouldn't do to be perceived as one. Not tonight, and not by this man. 

He needed to be authoritative, but not overbearing. Angry, but not unappeasably so. It was a fine rope to walk, and if he toppled off in either direction then his only option left would be to see how many shots from his hand cannon it took to kill a man made of made of shadows and reconstituted flesh.

(Assuming, of course, that he could die at all. Immortality: one of O'Deorain's few still-untested hypotheses.) 

There was a noise behind him—a droning buzz, rusted metal scraping against itself—that slowly coalesced into words. " _What. You didn't want them dead?_ "

Bitter, with a mocking edge. Not that _that_ was anything new.

"It is not a question of what I want." Akande pressed a hand against the computer's keyboard, feeling metal and plastic warp as he squeezed. "And it is not a question of what _you_ want. If you no longer wish to be an asset to Talon, you must let me know."

 _So I can hunt you down like a dog_ , he didn't say. He didn't have to; the two of them together had taken care of enough traitors and failures in their time.

" _Threatening to kill me and you don't even want to look me in the eyes. Is that what I am to you, Akande_?"

Beneath the cool apathy, his voice was thick with an undercurrent of poorly-hidden emotion—rage and shame and desire, simmering and ready to boil over. It was as blatant a cue as Akande would ever get.

Akande sighed, using the sound to mask the sound of his hand cannon cocking. Steady, unaffected, he turned to face Reaper.

Formless, twisted, wreathed in shadows and smoke, dripping other men's blood with every step he took, Gabriel was not _Gabriel_ tonight. His mask and cloak shifted in and out of solidity, giving Akande brief glimpses of skin so marked by scars that it hardly looked human. 

No, nothing about the figure standing in front of him was human. Gabriel was often a troublesome man—near always to drowning in his regrets, obsessed with history and the people he'd once called friends, able to see the bigger picture but unable to focus on it—but he was dependable. Sombra was habitually treacherous, Widowmaker unstable, O'Deorain so far from sanity that she only barely understood the definition of the word... Gabriel, though, could be reasoned with. Could be made useful.

 _Mostly_ , Akande reminded himself. 

Gabriel demanded he be called Reaper. But most days he was just a man wearing a mask. Akande had only seen _this_ , the bloodthirsty thing that lurked beneath the surface, a sparse few times. It was all too easy to forget that it even existed.

"Look you in the eyes?" Akande asked. The corner of his mouth pulled into a—deliberate, calculated—smile. "Do have them right now?"

Reaper snarled. Brief flashes of eyelike shapes formed in the wisps of shadow curling around his form, there and then gone, all of them staring wide-open at Akande for the few moments they existed.

Slowly, with a sense of great struggle, his face shifted into something recognizable: white bonelike fragments interlinking to form a familiar outline, shadows falling where they ought to instead of sliding across his skin like a living being.

It was Reaper's face that Akande found himself staring at when the transformation was finally done, not Gabriel's, but that too was expected. He had never once willingly shown Akande what he looked like underneath the skeletal mask and heavy leather. (Akande knew regardless, of course. He didn't work with subpar intel. But Reaper choosing to unmask himself of his own volition would be a sign, and not a good one.)

Akande took a step forward. It was safer to intrude on Reaper's space now that Reaper _had_ space. He wasn't quite so fluid anymore, wasn't filling every corner of the room with wayward wisps of his presence. Closer to a man.

"Look at you," he sighed. "So dutiful. Did you want to complete our mission that badly, Reaper?" He paused, letting his words settle, giving the man who was slowly becoming Gabriel again just enough time to realize what Akande knew. "Or could it have something to do with who they were targeting?"

Gabriel leapt forward with a deep, bone-rattling snarl, bringing one clawed hand up to slash at Akande's throat. Akande, sidestepped, took the strike on his shoulder instead—a shallow blow, unimportant—and used his momentum to slam Gabriel backwards into the wall.

"Enough!" he snarled. 

One hand wrapped around Gabriel's throat, he closed in until there were only inches between them. Crushing Gabriel's windpipe wouldn't kill him, wouldn't even slow him down the way he was tonight—but the man froze anyway, following some old instinct, his rattling animal growl dying in his throat as Akande stared into his mask's shadowed eye sockets.

" _Let me go_." Gabriel pushed at the hand against his neck, leaving shallow half-moon gashes on Akande's wrist. " _We're done here._ "

"You attack me and then you make demands? This isn't your call to make, _Reaper_."

As he spoke, he let his touch gentle, turning it from violent force to mere control. His thumb rubbed lightly against the layers of leather covering Gabriel's collarbone. This, too, was part of the routine Akande had learned.

(Gabriel was a desperate man. Starved for touch, for even the barest hint of human contact, but too proud to ask for it and too disgusted with his own body to even admit to himself that he desired it. Sometimes Akande suspected he let nights like these happen just so he'd have an excuse to feel Akande's warmth against him.)

" _It won't happen again._ "

His form was settling more, now. He could've broken Akande's hold simply by dissolving and reforming, but he stayed where he was.

"It will," Akande said. "For as long as those former students of yours live, it will."

Akande _felt_ the whiplash that shuddered through Gabriel's body, then, the tension that turned him from half-smoke to petrified stone.

" _That isn't..._ "

"You think I didn't know why you wanted to join me on this mission so badly?" Akande snorted. "I am not a blind man, Reaper. Or a stupid one."

The enemy of one's enemy was not always one's friend, after all, but they could make for a suitable distraction; when Akande had heard that some of Vialli's remaining allies were holed up here, and that they were hunting down some of the newly-resurrected Overwatch's members, he'd been intrigued. An interesting opportunity, to see who the winners among that fight would be and then to pick them off.

But Gabriel had volunteered himself as Akande's backup. And now the youngest Shimada slept easily somewhere in this city, unaware of how close he'd come once again to death, and Vialli's men... 

Well, Vialli's men likely weren't recognizable anymore. Akande had witnessed the aftermaths of these rages before. _Reaper_ liked to tear out throats, to disembowel, to become smoke in his enemies' lungs and then reform. The hotel those men had been holed up in would need more than a housekeeping service on call come tomorrow morning.

"Feeling nostalgic?" Akande asked. His lips were at the curve of Gabriel's neck, brushing a point just below the edge of the mask. For a moment, Akande entertained the thought of peeling back those layers of leather and finally feeling Gabriel's skin against his own. "Or is there something else I should know?"

Everyone in Talon had plots of their own. Akande tolerated O'Deorain's experiments, indulged Widowmaker's occasional disappearances. Even pretended at ignorance of Sombra's _extracurriculars_ , knowing he could tighten the net around the little shadow whenever he so needed. It should be no surprise that Gabriel might be harboring secrets of his own. But...

It wasn't _trust_ he felt towards Gabriel. Far from it. But Akande had always thought he understood the man. 

To lose him would be regrettable.

" _I_..." Gabriel started. His voice was finally beginning to lose its harsh droning buzz, settling back down into his usual smoke-rough tones. The man, emerging once more from his cocoon of death and viscera. "It's nothing. You're overthinking."

"Spare me your attempts at lies. I'm not a child, Reaper."

Gabriel was silent a long, long moment. His body shifted slightly, wavering at the edges even while he stood stock-still. "It was—a miscalculation." And then, with an edge of desperation that only Akande could have caught, "It _won't_ happen again."

Akande's fingers tightened a brief moment on Gabriel's neck, then relaxed again. He flicked the safety back into place on his hand cannon with a brief brush of thumb against palm.

It wouldn't be wise to go head-to-head against Gabriel. Not when the extent of his mastery over death was still a mystery to them both. But it wasn't pragmatism that stayed his hand, and it wasn't fear either.

 _Gabriel_ , Akande thought viciously, disgusted by his own weakness. Even the loss to Overwatch that earned him his prison sentence hadn't left him so disappointed in himself. _Of all people._

Fondness for anyone was a liability. Gabriel himself had proved that well enough tonight. Fondness for _Gabriel_ —this resentful, regretful, unstable man—was beyond folly, beyond the basest stupidity.

And yet. And _yet_.

Akande leaned forward, letting his forehead fall for the briefest moment against the bonelike slope of Gabriel's mask. He thought Gabriel would jerk away, snap back with a snarl, perhaps even finally unleash some of that barely-restrained bloodlust against Akande. Instead Gabriel only arched into the touch, as if he could feel it even through his armor's unyielding shape. A quiet noise, as soft as and as fragile as a brittle leaf being crunched underfoot, slipped from somewhere beneath the mask. A gasp, or maybe a sigh.

What was he feeling right now? Were his lips parting, were his eyes falling closed? Or was he brimming with resentment even now, hiding disgust behind the skull's shadowed sockets?

It was so easy to imagine getting his fingers under the curved shape of it and pulling it off. He would have a chance see the man as he truly was, then, not through photograph or blurry video but face to face. _Real_. He could finally force Gabriel to accept Akande's eyes on his.

Perhaps that would break Akande of his stupidity. Perhaps it wouldn't.

And it was not _weakness_ that guided him now, that kept his hands planted where they were and not moving closer to Gabriel's mask. It wasn't sentiment, or pity, or... anything else. Pragmatism alone guided him; Gabriel was loyal. He could still be useful. 

"See that it does not," he said quietly, and felt Gabriel's answering nod against his skin.


End file.
